The nouveau roman’s stylization functions as democratic equipment for modern lived experience

Evidence

But in that case, the seeming aestheticism of the nouveau roman veers dialectically into a form of a very different kind, one capable of fleeing the guilt of the aesthetic generally — Sartre’s suggestion that you could not read a nouveau roman in a Third World country, Lalong with the Bourdieu-type leisure-class “distinction” of reading it in a First World one — at the same time that it proposes new equipment for registering the raw material of everyday life and a new “libidinal apparatus” for coping with those kaleidoscopic shocks Benjamin, following Baudelaire, associated with the modern industrial landscape. At that point, the reproducibility of the new or artificial, invented genre becomes an index of its democratic accessibility; and this was always the reverse side and the progressive implication of the most notorious philistine reproaches to modernist art itself, as, for example to abstract painting, “Anyone could do that!” the answer being, “Of course! but you don’t want to, do you? You would have to want to!” — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 349

Categorization

• QUESTION: How exactly does ‘reproducibility of a genre’ make it democratic, versus merely accessible? The claim that aesthetic reproducibility indexes democratic access is worth pressing.
• XREF: Connects to Benjamin/Baudelaire shock theory of modern experience and Bourdieu’s distinction — both adjacent to the reader’s cognitive-map project. — connects to: Aesthetic experience functions as political apprenticeship for future freedom.; Democratization as a core commitment makes avant-garde practice postmodern, not modernist — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 1095